Multiple discourse relations on the sentential level in Japanese

Abstract

In the spoken language machine translation project Verbmobil, the semantic formalism Language for Underspecied Discourse representation structures (LUD) is used. LUD describes a number of DRSs and allows for underspecification of scopal ambiguities. Dealing with Japanese-to-English translation besides German-to-English poses challenging problems. In this paper, a treatment of multiple discourse relation constructions on the sentential level is discussed. These are common in Japanese but cause a problem for the formalism. It is shown that the underspecification is to be represented for them, too. Additionally, it is possible to state a semantic constraint on the resolution of multiple discourse relations which seems to prevail over the syntactic ccommand constraint.